I received this email below about Sea Shepherd:

Hello,

Please forgive my English. I found your blog yesterday while searching articles regarding the Cove. I totally agree that this is an issue of ethnocentrism rather than protesting for whaling or for killing Dolphins. The issue has gotten an extreme now. Please see this:

This is nothing but hatred. The fact that the Academy has awarded the movie the Cove an Oscar has given them more confidence in what they are doing to people in Taiji. I want to spread this as much as possible and make people realize how wrong they are to the people in Taiji. The people in Taiji do not deserve this. The anti-Whaling, anti-killing Dolphin people need to find another organizations or ways to achieve their goals but not by supporting Sea Shepherd.

Do you think you could in anyway (in your blog or through twitter) to raise a voice about this?

Thank you,
Noriko
Tokyo, Japan

Great execution and production. In my 20s, I worked on the trading floor of a British bank where there was another Asian guy named Sonny. A white guy named Steve used to call me Sonny and I just went along with it, and let him call me Sonny. One day, another trader who was sitting near him noticed and said, “Wait, did you just call him ‘Sonny’? That’s not Sonny, that’s Dyske.” He apologized profusedly but I thought it was pretty funny. At the Christmas party that year, the head trader got all the Asian men on the stage and asked Steve to point to Sonny. It was pretty funny.

My kid

The short answer is: I don’t really know. I don’t think anyone knows. So we need to make our best guesses, and that is what I would like to do below. Let me divide us Asian-American parents into two schools of thought. One school believes that we should teach our children whatever we know about our Asian heritage, which includes language, culture, values, customs, etc.. The other school believes that we should do our best to raise our children as Americans. Naturally, there are a lot of people who fall somewhere between the two extremes. Let’s call the first school, “bi-cultural school” and the latter “assimilation school”.

Statistically I’m not sure which school is more popular, but my own anecdotal evidence suggests that bi-cultural school is significantly more popular, at least among the first generation (immigrant) Japanese parents. My daughter attends a public school here in New York City and there are many Japanese parents. I’m one of the few parents who does not send their kids to Japanese schools on weekends, and I may be the only parent who does not teach Japanese to his child. Even my own parents are baffled by the fact that I do not. If my family was living in Japan, I would certainly teach my child English. The reason why I don’t teach my child Japanese has to do with the specific time in history and the context that my child will grow up in. Needless to say, I’m in the assimilation school.

Last week, New York Magazine published a thought-provoking article entitled “Paper Tigers – What happens to all the Asian-American overachievers when the test-taking ends?” The article meticulously analyzes what Asian-Americans experience in this country. The author, Wesley Yang, is a second generation Asian-American, and I do not believe he has a child. He writes from a point of view of a child and a victim. If he were a parent, he could not be so one-sided, since he would be partly responsible for what his children experience in the world. Although he covers a wide range of issues, parenting is left out.

Towards the end of the article, Yang reveals his own opinions of how Asian-Americans should behave in this country. He suggests that we behave more like the Americans. We shouldn’t be shy about getting (or demanding) what we want, but at the same time he suggests we should not do so by assimilating into the white-dominant culture, i.e., what white people find pleasant, comfortable, desirable, or appropriate.

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On March 18, 2011, the school my daughter attends, The Neighborhood School (PS363) in New York City, hosted a fundraising event for the victims of the Japanese earthquake and Tsunami. At the event, we filmed the students cheering for Japan, “Ganbare Nippon!”, which means “Don’t give up, Japan” or “Go Japan Go!”.

What Japan needs right now, more than anything else, is your emotional support. If you are a foreigner living in Japan, and want to get out of there, then just get out, but don’t spread hysteria or panic, since that only makes things worse. (Yeah, thanks a lot Gregory Jaczko!)

It’s funny and sad at the same time. I’m not sure if this was made for kids or adults either. It likens nuclear reactors to kids with bellyache. It is trying to explain that the reactors are right now farting, but not pooing.

To see what the Japanese people are watching on TV, you can go to ustream.tv for the live streaming of their public TV network, NHK. Also, here is a page with a collection of videos (scroll to the bottom of the page). But naturally, they are going to be sensitive to the feelings of the Japanese people so as not to cause any panic, which means their reporting will be rather conservative. For instance, they did not broadcast the popular video footage of the explosion of the nuclear reactor building (at least for a long time).

If you just want to follow the critical news, I think this page on Kyodo News is useful. It just shows you the latest and the most urgent news headlines.

Naturally, Twitter is useful for getting a sense of what people are talking about. Apparently the Japanese people at the disaster sites used Twitter to report the locations of the fire.

If you can read Japanese, this page on Google is useful in getting a sense of what the Japanese people are talking about. (The English version of the same thing.)

Blogs I like: New York Times, Aljazeera, Guardian, and Wall Street Journal.

And, one of the best explanations of what’s happening to the nuclear reactors by Dr. Josef Oehmen, a research scientist at MIT.

Readings of radiation levels from different prefectures.

Among all the sensational articles, this one gives you a small dose of relief.